How Instagram Aims To Change The Face Of Athlete Media

NEW YORK — Tennis icon Serena Williams is casually chatting about how she’s afraid of sharks. Golden State Warriors sharpshooter Stephen Curry is polling fans about which shoes to buy. Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is orchestrating a scavenger hunt to find free tickets.

These are just a sampling of a typical day on Instagram Stories, an ephemeral Instagram feature aiming to change the face of athlete media.

Since launching Instagram Stories a year ago, the feature has become a conduit through which athletes can share tidbits about their personal lives or behind-the-scenes clips of their professional lives.

The Snapchat rival took off after launching last August, reaching 150 million users in just a few months and cannibalizing some of Snapchat’s own user base just ahead of the teen app’s highly-anticipated initial public offering.

Since then, Instagram Stories has emerged as a clear winner in the market for ephemeral and personal storytelling, with more than 250 million users representing a third of Instagram’s 800 million-plus follower base.

The sports industry — the third-most popular community on Instagram behind music and entertainment — has used Instagram Stories and the ability to launch live video as a way to connect with fans during the season before, during and after games, as well as through the offseason.

It’s something that Will Yoder of Instagram’s sports partnerships team believes will continue to drive engagement between fans and athletes and shape Instagram as one of the primary platforms for which teams, athletes and leagues use to communicate and relate to fans.

“Live on Instagram is one of the biggest immediate megaphone you can use on social,” said Yoder in a recent interview with SportTechie.

At a soccer conference earlier this year, Jerry Newman, ‎Sport Partnership Lead at Facebook Europe, Middle East & Africa, said demand to create short video content on Instagram that stitch together an immersive storyline has “blown through the roof” among sports accounts.

“The creativity from sports clubs is amazing,” Newman said at Soccerex Global Convention. “A lot of the sports club realize — football clubs in particular — that athletes resonate really well. And it makes sense; years ago you would have to go to a club and ask for permission to have access to a player and then the player would do a Q&A with a newspaper or a TV company and that’d be your only relationship with that athlete. Nowadays, you can get to them every single day.”

The ability to make it personal and fun with the interactive stickers that provide things such as location tags and polls, drawing tools, and filters, have enabled athletes to sort of “develop their personalities online,” Newman said.

“The only way you saw an athlete was when they were on the field. Now you’re actually engaging with them and hearing way more about them than just what they do on the field,” he said. “You’re seeing their family, their lifestyles, you’re connecting with them in a way that you never could before.”

Across the entire Instagram family, sports have arisen as an industry that more users interact with than even fashion and news. Driving this demand — to the relief of sports franchises — are younger Instagram users who are looking to connect personally with once out-of-reach sports celebrities who are now seemingly much more relatable.

A third of Instagram users identify as sports fans and follow an average of 10 sports accounts each, with an average of eight of those accounts belonging to an athlete. Of those people, 94 percent said they come to Instagram to connect with the personal side of athletes, according to Instagram’s data.

Younger users tend to be considered super users, with users under the age of 25 spending an average of 32 minutes a day on Instagram. Of the accounts followed by teens, 30 percent of the top 100 are sports related. That’s in part driven by teen athletes, such as Rebel Football Club founder Calfreezy who has 1.2 million followers, said Yoder.

The NBA is quickly becoming another winner in the sports industry, Yoder said. The NBA has embraced not just Instagram but also video in general, which has been exploding on the app. The amount of time people spend watching video on Instagram has rocketed 80 percent in the past year, while Instagram has experienced a four-fold increase in number of videos produced per day.

With the NBA’s accounts — its regular account, WNBA, G-League, athlete accounts such as Curry’s, teams, and NBA History, it is producing an immense amount of content that has amassed more than 2.5 billion video views in total, according to Instagram.

The NFL has also started to embrace the platform, with many teams now going live on Instagram before or immediately after a game. One of its star players, Rodgers, has even been hosting a weekly scavenger hunt on the platform since August to give away gameday tickets.

Rodgers tends to hide them at local businesses in the Green Bay area and then uses Game of Thrones-esque riddles and clues to direct fans to the location. He’ll then snap a photo of them and post it to his own account, racking up anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 “likes.”

“Instagram Stories allows them to communicate with a younger audience in the way they want to consume content,” Yoder said.

This ability to reach younger fans at a time when sports franchise owners are expressing concern about a decline in younger demographics among their fan bases is part of what has fueled the demand and use of Instagram Stories.

Yoder said Instagram and parent company Facebook are aware of the trends and are working with teams, leagues and athletes to build new features into the platform that make it even easier for them to produce creative ephemeral content.

Another key benefit is that athletes and franchises can use Instagram Stories as a way to direct people to other accounts, such as official Instagram pages. In all, it is creating an ecosystem that — combined with Facebook’s new sports programming — are making the Mark Zuckerberg family of brands a force to be reckoned with in the rapidly evolving world of digital sports media.

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About Jen Booton

Jen is a senior writer at SportTechie covering the many ways technology is disrupting sports. On any given day she may cover a wide variety of stories ranging from the newest virtual reality training tools for the NFL, the rise of eSports leagues and the infiltration of drones in extreme sports. Prior to joining SportTechie, Jen was a technology reporter at MarketWatch, where she covered major Silicon Valley companies, such as Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook.
Jen is a licensed skydiver who jumps out of planes, helicopters and hot air balloons for fun in her spare time. She’s a former NCAA cross country athlete and currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.
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